Tuning in

Sometimes by avoiding the temptation to photograph the immediately obvious, our eyes open to observing myriad possibilities as one's senses 'tune in' to a place. Hisley Bridge, which lies over the River Bovey near Lustleigh is a tempting subject to photograph, I have made one photograph of it before during a pleasant autumn day and I can undertsand the lure of its iconic charm... a well preserved ancient packhorse bridge on an old drover's route, in a remarkable wooded valley. Yet to consider that charming bridge as the only reason to walk to that point of the river in search of a landscape photograph, is I feel to miss out on other potential studies ... different apects of an area, but parts of the 'inner landscape' that one might include in a classic vista.

I walked across the bridge, but as I did so I became hypnotized once again by the details of the journeys of water over stone. The standing-waves on the rapids just upstream of the bridge appealed to me. Fleeting glimpses of an interminable story steeped in deep-time... rocks formed under long vanished mountains of the Variscan Orogeny 350 million years ago, the bedrocks still being worn by ice and water carrying quietly abrasive sediments - slowly transported grain by grain to the sea. A visual verse of the poetry of the earth.

There was a time that I wouldn't have consciously noticed such individual details and potential compositions.

It's maybe a result of reading books such as David Ward's 'Landscape Within'and gazing at the latter works of JMW Turner that I notice such things as that wave, but I don't think I can turn the switch off for seeing many abstractions occurring in nature on my walks.

I thoroughly enjoyed immersing my senses in the making of photographs of the tumbling waveforms: wandering through the shallows and feeling the current; hearing the myriad tones; the rain-stick swooshing of the pea gravel underfoot; the aroma of ancient boggy & peaty woodland...and the light gilding the rocks beneath the tongue of the rapids. I think, that for me at least, that it's the immersive experiences that helps one to 'see' intorather than just 'look' at the landscape. My 'Of Metaphysics and Landscapes' Trilogy of blog posts attempts to explore such matters further.